The project was made in partnership with the association CRESCER, which supports people in social vulnerability, and the Municipality of Amadora. We sought to make the space inhabited from the very first moment.

We started from an existing building in the Central Park of Amadora, permeable to its surroundings, inviting occupation. We restored the scale and continuity of its space by removing interior walls, underlining the relationship with the exterior. We embraced the raw materials — lightness comes through addition. We added three volumes that shape the space.

We designed the emptiness to receive an artistic work, architectural in scale, that could be created by many hands and gestures, together with the beneficiaries of the CRESCER association.

Using art as mediation between the space and its inhabitants, we invented a process that would be participatory.

We invited Fernanda Fragateiro to work with us — a natural choice given the relationship of her work with the codes and processes of architecture.

A ceiling installation was created, that shelters and defines. A new topography, an atmosphere.

We believe that life in this space and in this architecture holds an enormous potential for hope.

To inhabit a space is at once an experience of connection and shelter. This happens when the space is lived in. The opposite of an inhabited space is a place of discomfort and of not belonging.

The ceiling installation is at once part of the architectural experience, part of the construction process, and a place for the collection of memories. It is a space. It is a ceiling. It is a Restaurant.